That meant assessing her own performance while also considering what served the series as a whole. Larson said she had to detach from the instinct to scrutinise every personal choice and instead concentrate on identifying material that was not working.
The difficulty was Elizabeth’s restraint. Larson described the character as very different from herself, particularly in how little emotion she displays.
“I struggled with it a lot, and I felt very lost with it,” Larson said. “I am just very used to my understanding of when something’s working — when it feels very true and I’m just in it.”
With Elizabeth, that familiar signal was harder to find. Larson said the part of her that might naturally cry during a scene instead felt suppressed because the character “won’t give it to anybody”.
Scott regarded that emotional containment as one of the performance’s strengths. Larson, meanwhile, said she was proud of how much the production managed to communicate and of the group that made it, although she feels less connected to a project once it has been released.
“Then it’s not about me anymore,” she said. “It’s just images and feelings.”
Scott refused to diagnose Tom Ripley
Scott’s task in Ripley was complicated by the character’s cultural baggage. Patricia Highsmith’s grifter and murderer has appeared in several screen adaptations, most famously in Anthony Minghella’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow.
Rather than beginning with labels such as “liar”, “sociopath” or “psychopath”, Scott said he found those descriptions unhelpful. He approached Ripley as someone who lies — and eventually kills — to escape increasingly dangerous situations.
“I tried to make him lie as little as he could get away with,” Scott said. “And he murders to get himself out of a situation. He’s not bloodthirsty. I mean, he could have not murdered, I suppose.”
That final point is difficult to dispute.
Scott said the production filmed for nearly a year, while the scenes involving murder occupied only a few weeks. Most of the role therefore required him to portray the quieter behaviour around the violence: Ripley watching, adapting and attempting to pass within a world to which he does not belong.
Larson dryly observed that the character is “mostly not murdering”. Scott’s performance depended on what filled the remaining time.
Why Scott avoided earlier versions of Ripley
Although Scott loved Minghella’s 1999 film, he deliberately avoided revisiting it before playing the role. He said writer-director Steven Zaillian’s distinctive plan for the Netflix series helped free him from the version already lodged in his memory.
Scott initially worried that he was too old for the part, an impression shaped partly by the previous film. Zaillian, however, wanted to age the characters up and place them inside a deliberately noirish, black-and-white visual world.
That clarified why another adaptation could justify its existence.
Scott also reminded himself that Minghella’s film was itself one interpretation among many. Alain Delon had previously played the character in René Clément’s Purple Noon, and Highsmith’s creation has been repeatedly reworked across film and television.
His experience in theatre offered a useful comparison. Shakespearean roles have been performed by thousands of actors, Scott noted, without requiring each new performer to reproduce the choices of the last.
“I think the response, I suppose, is to be respectful, but not too reverent,” he said. “What’s the point of doing it if you’re going to do it exactly the same way?”
Acting gave both performers a way through shyness
Larson and Scott traced their willingness to inhabit outsiders back to childhood experiences that were less assured than their careers might suggest.
Larson began acting at six after repeatedly asking her parents, who were chiropractors, to let her pursue it. She said weekly acting sessions effectively gave her “a script” for holding conversations at a time when she was extremely shy and struggled to express herself.
Scott likewise attended Saturday drama classes despite shaking before entering the room. He also took elocution lessons because of what he described as a severe childhood lisp.
Neither attended drama school, a discovery that visibly delighted Larson during the conversation. Their professional education instead came through years of auditions, intermittent employment and rejection.
Larson described her career as a “slow burn”, sometimes booking only one job a year but getting close often enough to continue. She now views that pace as valuable preparation: when larger opportunities arrived, she did not feel overwhelmed by the scale of the work.
Scott agreed that avoiding intense scrutiny early in a career can leave an actor more room to experiment. “So it’s good that I was unemployed for so long,” he said.
A Ripley universe remains a joke — for now
The pair ended their discussion of adaptation by contemplating the logical destination of modern intellectual property: a shared cinematic universe.
Larson proposed an “into the Ripley-verse” project in which the various incarnations of Tom Ripley might assemble. Scott compared the idea to Marvel and asked whether all the Ripleys would simply get together.
Larson joked that studios were already interested and admitted she was writing herself into the imagined project. Scott responded that she would make a good Tom Ripley.
Beneath the joke was the argument Scott had made about iconic roles. Tom Ripley does not belong permanently to Damon, Delon, Scott or any other performer. The character survives because each adaptation is allowed to look again — preferably without all the Ripleys being required to save the multiverse.
